Today, after encountering some difficulties in slicing the loaf the first time I tried, one week ago, I finally arranged to serve a breakfast (actually a late lunch) of eggs and, ..scrapple!

Okay, it does look somewhat monochromatic; I don’t know why I couldn’t have introduced a cherry tomato or two.

Although conventional wisdom would describe this as a Lancaster County breakfast, it would not have looked out of place in the area my parents were from in Wisconsin, or, for that matter, in the areas where their own families had originated early in the 19th century. The Amish themselves, popularly known as ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’, whether in Pennsylvania or elsewhere, are not ‘Dutch’ at all, except that, along with the people of the Netherlands, they share membership in the larger Germanic ethnic group.  For hundreds of years the appellation, ‘Dutch’ was used in English to describe people from both the Netherlands and Germany.

As for the scrapple, unless you are or feel close to the culinary traditions of ‘the Dutch’, in the larger sense, don’t look carefully at the picture below.

It was a lot of fun doing this for the first time, and it was delicious. Oh, and, compared to bacon, it’s obviously ein Schnäppchen [a bargain].

There will be more color the next time.

The presentation was clearly much simper than most of these breakfasts/lunches, in deference to a culture I respect, but to which I’m not actually attached.

• eight ounces of scrapple from Millport Dairy Farm. sliced about 1/4″ thick, breaded on both sides, using a local whole wheat flour from the Blew family of Oak Grove Mills in the Union Square Greenmarket, fried, turning once, inside a large, very hot seasoned cast iron pan until each side had been seen beginning to brown on the surfaces touching the pan, removed and kept warm in a very slow oven, half a dozen Americauna eggs from the Amish of Millport Dairy Farm replacing them inside the pan, after some butter was added, the 6 Spiegeleier finished with Maldon salt, freshly-ground black pepper, and a sprinkling of garlic chives (Germans use garlic and chives, I reasoned), served with toast from 2 kinds of bread, a day-old mini-baguette and a Balthazar rye boule, both from Whole Foods Market
• the music today, within a long Sunday liturgical breakfast tradition, marked the first of a number of anticipated seasonal ‘passions’ (musical narratives from the Gospels), Orlando de Lassus’ ‘St. Matthew Passion’, Bo Holten, conducting Bo Holten conducting Musica Ficta